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Here’s what’s changed politically over the past few years

Yesterday I asked "What changed?" to cause Democrats to lose the election. Today I spent some time diddling around in the General Social Survey to see if I could find out. My question was: What big gaps have recently opened up between Democrats and Republicans.

For starters, here's an example of what I'm not talking about:

The number of people saying they have no religion has increased among both Democrats and Republicans, but it's increased a lot more among Democrats. Thirty years ago the gap was only two percentage points while today it's 15 points.

But this is a long-term trend. It doesn't explain anything recent. And it so happens that nearly everything is like this. General happiness, number of children, approval of gay marriage, abortion, defense spending, affirmative action, tougher courts, confidence in education, you name it. All of these have showed a steadily increasing gap between Republicans and Democrats but nothing new recently.

But a few things did change recently. Here they are:

Confidence in both science and medicine was roughly similar between Democrats and Republicans all the way through 2018. Then both plummeted among Republicans, almost certainly due to COVID-era Trumpian disinformation about masks, vaccines, the origin of the virus, and so forth.

Confidence in the press wasn't very different until the spread of Fox News in the early 2000s. For the next 16 years Republican trust in the press was about 20 points lower than Democrats'.

This became turbocharged after Trump took office and went on his "fake news" crusade. For the last few years Republican trust in the press has been 60 points lower than Democrats'.

Starting in 2014, the number of Democrats who thought we should spend more on welfare programs spiked up. Republican views stayed about the same. This is presumably a Ferguson effect, but I'm not sure about that.

In 2021, the number of Democrats who self-ID as gay spiked upward by four percentage points before settling down slightly. The number of Republicans who said they were gay went down by a point.

This is an old favorite: For years Republicans reported higher financial satisfaction than Democrats by more than 10 percentage points. As soon as Biden became president that plummeted to -5 points despite an objectively pretty good economy.

This chart is a little different: it shows Republicans and Democrats on separate lines. As you can see, Republicans have been growing more conservative fairly steadily for the past 30 years. Democrats showed little change until 2016, when the number saying they're liberal spiked upward 20 points in just six years.

The GSS doesn't have any questions about immigration—though I think other evidence suggests a partisan gap that's big but has been opening up pretty steadily for years. However, the Biden-era surge in illegal crossings may have made it more salient for Republicans than Democrats.

For the time being, this is just raw information. There's nothing super obvious that ties all these things together. But give me enough time and maybe I'll come up with a theory.

40 thoughts on “Here’s what’s changed politically over the past few years

  1. kenalovell

    These self-reporting surveys suffer from the obvious flaw that respondents describe the person they like to think they are, not necessarily the one who actually exists.

    I'd like to see some surveys about the way respondents believe other people's behavior and attitudes have changed. Are their work colleagues more or less accepting of LGBTQ people? Have the people they socialise with become more or less willing to express hatred or contempt for Republicans/Democrats? Do their parents/children seem more or less optimistic that the rest of their lives will be safe and financially comfortable? Do they see more or less support on social media for harsher punishments for crime?

    Surveys like this would provide informative and valuable insights into the way Americans perceive community values and attitudes changing over time.

  2. cmayo

    My theory is that these are all just individual pieces of information that are tracking the same general polarization. Nothing more.

    1. bouncing_b

      Yes. All of these - except maybe “no religion” and “ID as gay” - are symptoms of polarization rather than giving clues about its underlying causes or the basis for a theory.

      My theory is that during stressful and insecure times like the present it is much easier to trigger people’s fears than to lift them up. Openness to change comes with lack of worry. Republicans and their wealthy backers have been playing this tune for decades with great success.

    2. MF

      I disagree. Many of these show how big parts of our elite society have lost credibility.

      You wonder why conservatives distrust medical and scientific professionals? Look no further: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-health-protests-301534. Apparently weddings, funerals, church services, and the jobs at which we make our living were too dangerous for us to attend. But protests for causes that the left favors were OK.

      And the media? Well, the examples are too many to count, but here is MSNBC claiming "‘Nefarious’: Fake news on Biden's age pumped through local outlets by right-wing controlled Sinclair" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEGr8-Ttuo0&ab_channel=MSNBC. The NY Times has STILL not corrected its article claiming that Trump lied when he said that FEMA was deliberately not helping Trump supporters despite FEMA itself now admitting that one of its supervisors told workers to skip homes with Trump signs while offering help.

      1. cephalopod

        The church vs protest argument is so incredibly stupid, and it shows just how clueless people are about transmission.

        Church services were extremely dangerous during covid: singing in a confined space is extremely risky for a virus that can spread via aerosols. We had documented superspreader events from indoor singing.

        Protests that are held outside are much, much, much safer, because being outdoors is much, much, much safer than being indoors. I watched virus rates in Minnesota ( ground zero for protests) and rates for covid continued to drop throughout the period of the protests and the months immediately after. The only infection risk during outdoor protests is getting arrested, which results in being put in a van and indoor cell with others. Since few people were arrested, few transmissions occurred.

        Some events seem like they are outdoor, like Sturgis, but actually involve a lot of indoor activity: restaurants, stores, and hotels. Sturgis visitors created a clear infection spike in MN, because so many people brought it back after their trip. Riding a motorcycle down the highway is super safe, but everything else involved in the trip was very risky.

        There were some restrictions that seemed unnecessary to me: bans on recreational boating and on drive-in church services (held in cars in a parking lot). Outdoor activities were fairly safe. Only tightly-packed outdoor activities, like being a spectator at professional soccer matches, were of any significant risk. I was at protests. They were not at all tightly packed. That is why there is no evidence of a protest-based infection surge. If Evengelicals had run around the streets yelling Bible verses, that also would have been safe, because it would have been outside and relatively dispersed.

        But church services, weddings, and funerals are not only typically indoors, they almost always involve a high number of elderly people and often have group singing. That is super risky behavior for an at-risk population.

        I missed being in church a lot during covid, but anyone paying the least bit of attention to what constituted a high risk of transmission knew church services were far too risky to continue.

          1. jv

            This is hysterical. So there is overwhelming evidence... in tiny, tiny details and little itty bits of nuance if you look in juuust the right places.

            If only we had been encouraged to inject ourselves with bleach and Kamala would have won.

  3. cld

    The key distinction is that conservatives campaign against liberals, while liberals campaign in favor of policies.

    Too much joy, not enough hate. Trying to reach out to conservatives who aren't trying to reach out to you is always failure, it will never work.

    That's all that it's about and that's all it will always be about until progressives actively run against conservatives, against who they are as people.

    They're certainly a target rich environment, it's not like you'd be lying about them.

    I think I've been writing exactly this in these very comments for a very long time and as far as I can, --no one listens.

    1. jv

      I love me some Michelle Obama, but if ever there was a categorical mistake made by Dems, it's putting any credibility in "when they go low, we go high". When the bully kicks you in the nuts, justifying their behavior because they were abused children doesn't stop conservative social rapists from raping society.

  4. KenSchulz

    Here is something that is very different in the last decade. A candidate for President won the Electoral College despite the largest loss of the popular vote by an EC winner, by a factor of about five. Four years later, the same individual, now having been twice impeached but not removed, running as the incumbent, lost by a much larger margin in the popular vote, and lost the election in the EC. Yet that individual remained the leader of the party and the nominee-presumptive for the next Presidential year. And indeed, that former President, having been indicted for federal and state crimes, won his party's primaries, despite running a minimal campaign, and went on to win election. Richard Nixon didn't hold such sway over his party after 1960, and he lost by a very small margin in his first attempt (and was not yet a crook). Almost every other losing Presidential candidate has faded out of sight after a single loss.
    The real question to ask about 2024 is, how did a large part of the GOP become a cult of personality, and what accounts for the enlargement of that cult after 2020, given that its object did nothing at all to broaden his appeal, and in fact did a number of things one would expect to lose him support?

    1. illilillili

      The cult didn't enlarge. The cult produced the same number of voters in 2020 as 2024.

      The real question to ask is why people who weren't and aren't members of the cult failed to turn out to vote in 2024.

      1. call_me_navarro

        just a guess, but i think the death-cult has achieved its larger aim of making politics so ugly that the honorable are turned away.

        i also think it likely that the number of death-cultists who identify as gay has gone down because queer folk are now one of their biggest targets.

  5. rkenhall

    Any way to tell if these changes in Republican beliefs come from long-term Republicans becoming more conservative or from more conservative people being attracted to Trump’s version of the party?

    1. golack

      I wouldn't characterize The Federalist Society, the Supreme Court, Trump, or the Republican party as conservative. Reactionary? Yes.

  6. skeptonomist

    What ties all these things together is the continued campaign by Republicans to split lower-income voters on "social issues". The racism has become more explicit and so has the demonization of the opposition. This campaign reinforces the feeling of belonging to the White Christian Tribe, and when tribal instincts become dominant everything is perceived as "us" against "them" and facts and logic are not important. Perceiving the other side as "vermin" is part of the process. Nothing else explains how MAGAs have lost touch with reality.

    This of course is in reaction to the actual advances that have continually been made in equality and tolerance for non-whites, women and LGBTQ people. Would the process have occurred if the left had not continued to press, and had not done the specific things that the right complains about? Maybe, but Republicans have relied on the split for over fifty years and would not be likely to give up the campaign. Republicans don't need actual excesses by the left, they obviously can make things up, like Haitians eating your pets and public schools changing the sex of your children.

    Many people on the left have responded with hatred of all those on the right, but this is natural and probably inevitable. The whole process has been cynically initiated and continued by Republican politicans and right-wing media, certainly not just Trump. There is no deliberate campaign to increase hatred by politicians on the left.

    This is not really a recent phenomenon, just an intensification. But the election of Obama, who won because of the bungling of the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crash, probably was a major spur to racism. This was when Trump entered the political scene with birtherisml

  7. Jasper_in_Boston

    What big gaps have recently opened up between Democrats and Republicans.

    None. While the two bases are a lot different at this point, it's been a gradual process.

    But more basically, the election result wasn't due to a big gap of anything, but a pretty modest shift in voting (at most about one in 16 voters shifted I'd say, and it's probably less than that) driven by the highest annual inflation during an administration since Carter was president.

    Anyway, this effect didn't appear to hurt Democrats too much in 2022, but they have may have done even better yet with lower inflation, and in any event we all know we see a spike in voting by less affluent voters—and thus voters who are more vulnerable to higher prices—in presidential years.

    (Also, Democrats suffered smaller losses than many/most incumbent parties in rich counties. Look at the UK Tories. And Canada's Liberals are looking at a blood bath.)

    I wish pundits would use more temperature language in describing this election. While an incredibly dispiriting result for Democrats, that's mainly because of the qualities of the candidate who won. But Trump's margin over his opponent will be one of the smallest of a second term victory in US history, and his party's performance in House races was dismal.

    Not a mandate. Not a landslide. Not even close. AND he'll have basically zero fiscal space to work with. Oh, and he's a lame duck already.

    1. Joseph Harbin

      I agree. There's a good reason the election was a catastrophe but it's not because Democrats got shellacked. The big gap is between the kind of government the two candidates promised to deliver, one normal and moderate-progressive, the other radical and neofascist. I don't think an honest account of the difference between those two visions got through to many voters, and that's a problem, but it's not a reason to lurch the party to the left or the right, as various people would like to do.

      There's an assumption that if Democrats will just do X, the voters will reward them. It's a flawed premise. Joe Biden, after all, did more for the working class and for unions than any Dem (and of course, GOP) president since at least LBJ. But no one seems to know that. There was no reward. The useful adjustments Dems could make: policy emphasis (less important); opposing the Trump admin (important); finding a way to reach voters through all the noise (most important).

      The margin, as you point out, was slim. Projections put the number at about 1.5%, with Trump either just over or just under 50%. That ranks 50th largest of 55 presidential elections when the pop vote winner also won the EV. His EV margin is 43rd of 60 total. He won, but by historically unimpressive margins.

  8. somebody123

    Look at my chart showing the temperature of the water in my pot. The temperature rose at a constant rate, but suddenly the water began to evaporate and quickly disappeared. It can’t be the temperature that caused the water to boil- there was no inflection point, just a steady rise. I must look for another force that caused the water to disappear.

  9. LeeDennis

    OK, Somebody, I see what you did there. Auto-correct's an unwonderful thing. And commenters like Jasper are the reason Kevin's blog is the best on the internet for thinking about public affairs.

    1. KenSchulz

      But don’t miss somebody123’s point — abrupt effects can result from causes that changed slowly. Playing on the autocomplete fail was just a happy accident.

    2. DFPaul

      Totally agree (about the commenters here). As for the temperature gradually rising, I think what needs explaining is why in 2018, 2020, and 2022 the water was not evaporating but condensing.

  10. FrankM

    All those things mainly effect the 80% (maybe even 90%) of the people who are consistent Democrats or Republicans. Elections are won or lost by appealing to swing voters in the middle.

    Huge number of people have the memory span of a fish. Surveys show that people thought things were pretty good in Trump's first administration and don't blame him for COVID and the aftereffects. Greg Sargent at TNR had a really good article about this last week.

    Also, don't discount the number of people thinking Trump is actually going to do many of the things he campaigned on. Don't hold your breath waiting for "No Taxes on Tips" and "No Taxes on Overtime". The Leopards Eating People's Faces Party keeps winning for the same reasons every time.

  11. shapeofsociety

    Well, thanks for giving it a try. Most of the attempts at explaining the election are based on the writer's personal bias with no data to back it up, or one piece of data that might not be any good.

    Honestly, you might be my main source of news from now on. Your level head and heavy use of data does a lot to keep me sane.

  12. DeLesley Hutchins

    Financial satisfaction is mostly due to inflation, IMO. Plus, there's a bit of a delayed reaction. In 2020 and 2021, people correctly attributed inflation to the pandemic; there was lots of stuff that you couldn't buy period, regardless of price. But now the pandemic is over, and prices still haven't come back down to where they were before. Thus, there's been this dawning realization that we will now have to pay $20 for a hamburger for the rest of our lives. I know that I personally starting really noticing the change about a year ago.

    You can argue until you're blue in the face that "lowering inflation" does not mean "lowering prices", but that math is too hard for the average voter. It doesn't help that Fox News has hammered on the issue for the past two years.

  13. DeLesley Hutchins

    Self-ID as gay, and self-ID as liberal, are part of the wokeness wave. Liberals were falling over themselves to supposedly advocate for LGBTQ/black/whatever rights, but most of that was just virtue-signalling, much like the Gaza campus protests. Self-ID is (obviously) a big part of virtue-signalling.

    It's no surprise that there was a backlash to that, as many reasonable people called BS on the whole virtue-signalling aspect. The black lives matter movement destroyed their own credibility, because nobody in their right mind would want to "defund the police." And while prior civil rights issues (desegregation, gay marriage) were pretty cut-and-dried morally, trans rights issues (e.g. trans girls in women's sports, transition drugs for adolescents) are just a whole lot more complicated.

    1. name99

      This is not the only "answer".

      Another useful way to look at the issue is that there are some people (probably a majority, but a thin majority) who appreciate how thin a veneer civilization is on top of savagery, while others seem to feel that every element that gave us current civilization can be destroyed and something just as good, heck better, will immediately replace it.
      In this telling the Neo-Republicans are united by an understanding that, imperfect as what we have today is, it's the best society in human history, and we need to be be very careful that we don't destroy out. The Neo-Democrats, conversely, are the party of year-zero and blank-slatism. And if that makes the Neo-Republicans conservatives, well, that's as empty an insult as all the others that have been thrown out; what it certainly does NOT do is make the Neo-Democrats the heirs to liberalism.

      What's significant about all the schemes I'm suggesting and pointing out is how they're not this tired identity-based nonsense. But, honestly, as long as your response to "what happened in 2024" is "how can we reclaim the Latino vote" (ooh, LatinO -- how soon they forget) or "where did the queer vote go", rather than moving BEYOND these identity segments, you deserve to keep losing.

  14. illilillili

    The big question is: what's changed that caused Democrats to not vote?

    The most obvious explanation is that Harris moved so far to the right as to give sometime Democrat voters no reason for voting.

  15. illilillili

    The other obvious big change between 2020 and 2024 is that in one the Democrat candidate was an old white protestant man.

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